SELENA THE STRIPPER
During the 2017 resurgence of the Me Too movement, you may not have heard much from sex workers. Were we there? Did you somehow miss us? As a sex worker, I can attest that we were there, and some of us spoke openly about surviving sexual assault, but many of us were also reluctant to come forward. Those of us on the front lines of the fight for decriminalization often hesitate to admit to the abuses we have faced, for fear that our opponents will use our trauma against us to further crack down on our industry. Those of us who perform services outside of the protected spectrum of legal sex work often remain silent for fear of incrimination and prosecution. Considering that society has historically sided with predators, all victims of sexual assault are forced to make the difficult decision of whether or not to come forward. The difficulty of prosecuting sexual assault is only exacerbated when defining it within a commercial sex exchange. And so we look to our community. We share our stories and protect each other. We confide in each other because the rest of the world writes off our assaults as “part of the job.” This book exists to create space for our stories. It is where we acknowledge the trauma that has touched so many of our lives. It is also an incredible show of resilience and diversity. This is a safe space, for those of us who are denied safety everywhere else. And so I begin with my own confession.
I began my foray into sex work by failing miserably. I was in my early twenties attending an art school in Baltimore that my family could hardly afford. I was living modestly and committing petty theft to make up for the difference between what I had and what I wanted. I bought into the internship-industrial complex and volunteered my free labor to an artist in Brooklyn, hoping it would open a door to the NYC art community. She was a Black performance artist making edgy work that explored gender and body commodi-fication, who wore masks that made her look like Black Barbie. My portfolio explored similar themes. I scheduled a visit to her studio and asked if I could assist her over the summer, and she agreed. I didn’t know where I was going to stay. I had an apartment in Baltimore, but I was homeless in New York. I knew a lot of people in the city, but none of them well enough to ask if I could crash at their place for a few nights a week. Space is a commodity few New Yorkers have enough of to share. I thought sugar dating might solve my housing situation, and I had hoped I would find a friend who might let me sleep on their floor while I searched for a sugar daddy.
One weekend a friend—a pretty white woman—invited me to her gorgeous penthouse apartment in Manhattan where she had just moved in with her older tech bro sugar daddy. I wanted that. I wanted to find one of those. At the time, I was hesitant to even call her partner her “sugar daddy,” as if it was a derogatory term. I didn’t know how she viewed her relationship: if it was emotional and she was a “kept woman,” or if it was an explicit, financially based partnership. Whatever it was, I wanted it, and seeing her proved to me that it was possible.
The veteran sex worker in me cringes at how unprepared I was to begin this journey, but the reality was that I didn’t have any viable mentors. My friend happened upon her tech bro daddy at a conference. She didn’t have to navigate digital sugar dating and didn’t have any tips for me. At that time, there was much more of a clandestine silence around sex work. There weren’t a lot of guides aside from what SeekingArrangement offered, and that site is notorious for dodging the label “sex work” for legal and liability reasons. My first profile was full of misconceptions and language informed by porn. My Blackness translated to “ebony”; I was in college, which translated to “barely legal”; and I was small, which translated to “petite.” I didn’t know what beauty meant for a person like me. I grew up in Oklahoma, where Black did not equal beautiful. I didn’t know anything about makeup because I’d never cared to learn. I didn’t know what men wanted; I just knew that for whatever reason, they seemed to want me. I’d dealt with sexual advances and overt propositions from men since I hit puberty at eleven. Even with my queer looks, I was subjected to the male gaze. I knew I was an object of lust; the question was how to harness that for my benefit. How could I turn unwanted attention into housing?
I knew her world was different from mine as a Black and Indigenous nonbinary person who had recently shaved their head and refused, for moral reasons, to shave anything else. And yet I felt that her reality was accessible for me. I was naive.
My first foray into sugaring was brash and poorly researched, and I wasn’t asking the right questions. What rate did I expect? What services was I willing to provide? What did a successful profile look like? I did have an answer to the last question: a successful profile was white. BIPOC like me were not the faces featured on the website. There was no blueprint for a person like me. Even now, I feel a pang of sadness that there was nobody I could look to for help. And that lack of guidance and support led me into dangerous situations.
I didn’t know how to filter for viable candidates. Instead of searching for clues to verify my candidates’ financial circumstances, I was primarily concerned with avoiding anybody too old or ugly. Because I was unfamiliar with the economic geography of NYC, I wasn’t filtering according to borough or neighborhood. If I had been smarter, I would have narrowed my search to affluent areas. If you can’t afford the Upper West Side, you can’t afford me. I chatted with a number of possibilities, labeling them in my phone as “Jay Possible Sugar Daddy” and other irreverent names, but as is the case with all dating sites, the number of people actually willing to meet is much smaller than the number of matches you make.
I went on two dates. The first was with a man who owned a carpentry company. He was a tall white man in his midfifties with a substantial gut. He reminded me a little of Dan Conner from Roseanne. We chatted over beers. I was terrified, and embarrassed to be seen with him. He was easily twice my age, and I looked young enough that I got carded by both the bouncer and the bartender. I felt as if I were a prop child in To Catch a Predator, and Chris Hansen would pop out at any moment. We walked to a park nearby, and he asked if he could kiss me. I didn’t know how to say no, so I nodded in agreement and kissed this man in broad daylight without being paid a dime. I was overwhelmed with repulsion and shame. I felt so visible and I couldn’t handle the idea of anybody seeing me with him. I made up an excuse to leave and practically ran to the subway.
Ambitious baby heaux that I was, I’d lined up a second date for later that night. I was flustered but undeterred. This round, I was meeting a man who appeared to be at least decent looking. He was Black, in his early forties. I’d picked him for his looks, even though his profile raised a massive red flag: he wasn’t looking for “someone just out for money.” That’s always the most perplexing flex. Why put up a profile on a sugar dating site if you aren’t looking to pay a sex worker for their time? But I hoped, contrary to every signal, that I might convince him to pay me. We met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side and he bought me dinner. It was a casual dining spot, nothing that would hurt his wallet. I’d set up our date with the understanding that I would be spending the night at his house. I was desperate. I didn’t have the money for a hotel or Airbnb, and I needed a place to stay. I followed him to his apartment in Harlem. It was a rough area, and a tiny apartment. As soon as we arrived, I realized with certainty he would not be paying me. I hadn’t negotiated payment, so while it was shitty, it was also my fault. I resigned myself to the reality that I was stuck in a sketchy shoebox of an apartment with a strange man.
He put on a TV show and made his move. He started kissing me, jamming his tongue down my throat, and roughly pulled down my shirt, exposing my breasts. He reached under my skirt for my vulva and I froze. It was too much, and I had at no point consented to any of it. I was a twenty-one-year-old kid just trying to find somewhere to sleep. I somehow managed to articulate that I wasn’t ready. When I voiced my no, he became grumpy. He clearly felt entitled to having his way with me. He reluctantly assured me that he wouldn’t hurt me—he wouldn’t do anything I didn’t want. He pulled out a sofa bed for me and went to his room. I began settling in, grateful for a bed. I was nearly asleep when he came back into the room and lay beside me. He started thrusting against me, reaching into my clothes. I felt utter terror. I started whispering “Please don’t” repeatedly.
“Please don’t. Please don’t. Please don’t.”
Please don’t rape me. He recoiled, realizing the line he’d nearly crossed, and left my bed, returning to his room. Before he closed his door, he said, “I don’t want to see you in the morning.” His hostility was palpable. I couldn’t sleep at that point. I didn’t know if he would come back again. I lay still, trying to take up as little space as possible, trying not to make a sound. As soon as the morning came and the first rays of sunlight peeked in, I grabbed my backpack and left for the bus station.
Two years later, I managed to develop enough courage for a second foray into the sex industry. The greatest difference was that when I began stripping, I had a community. A number of my friends from college had gotten into dancing before me. They all worked together at a little club called the Ritz. I’d come to know about their work through the art they were making about it. I was entranced by what they were creating, from a pop-up strip club performance art space, to gritty poetry readings, to an installation chronicling one woman’s journey from early sexualization to sex work. I felt like I was already woven into the narrative, even though I hadn’t had any success.
One of my partners at the time was an experienced stripper. They patiently taught me everything they knew and pointed me in the direction of online resources to research before taking the plunge. They invited me to the club during one of their shifts, and I watched them work. They were in full female drag with a very fake-looking blond wig, and they were killing it. They had a fluidity to their dance style I’d never seen before, and the men were eating it up. I auditioned and another friend showed me around on my first night. The two of them supported me. They told me about Pleasers and helped me pick out my first dance outfit. I was very much a baby stripper, but they protected me. My little community made sure that I would be safe during my first night at the club.
THIS BOOK IS about many things: making complex the otherwise essentialized sex worker narrative of “happy hooker” or “trafficking victim”; advocating for our rights as a diverse labor force; telling our stories, the happy and the traumatic. But it is also about community—the knowledge we pass down to protect the next generations. For a community that is constantly silenced and erased, spoken for and talked over, the gathering of so many voices here is powerful. We create a safer future by speaking and sharing. Too often those of us who are advocating for the dignity and rights of sex workers are afraid to voice these less-than-positive experiences. We don’t want to hurt the cause by talking about abuses, assaults, or rapes. We don’t want to be pigeonholed into the role of victim, even if we are sometimes victimized. Often it feels like we are fighting for the minimum: to exist without persecution, criminalization, and stigma. But in this fight, there is room to demand more. Yes, I can say I was raped, but that doesn’t give you license to take away the place where I work, the means by which I support myself, and my financial independence. Every worker has a voice, even those who have been trafficked. They can say what they want without paternalistic outsiders deciding what they need. We can speak, and it is time people listened. It is time for our perspectives to be treated as legitimate. It is time to include us in all that affects us.
And so, it is with great honor that I introduce this book, a collection of writings by heauxs across the spectrum of sex industries. Their experiences are as diverse as they are. It is very rare to collect an anthology of writing like this about sex work, authored by sex workers—so eat it up, take notes, share it with everyone you know, bring up passages over Thanksgiving dinner with your bigoted family. We’re speaking, and it’s time to listen.